Oh Wow! I think I'm going to be sick!

Deciding for our Belgian Egyptian child

At less than 100 days old, our son, Iskander, embarked on the greatest adventure of his short life when we visited family and friends in Egypt – his first trip to his other homeland.

Our sojourn in Egypt also got us thinking about where would be best to raise our son in the various stages of his life, and how our choice of location could affect the person he turns out be. It will influence not only his personality, but his sense of national, cultural and religious identity.

In Egypt, certain advantages and disadvantages became quickly apparent. Cairo is one of the world's great metropolises and possesses many of the benefits of a mega city. Even though Iskander has revealed to us a new level of warmth among normally-reserved Belgians, the culture in Egypt is more tolerant of babies and children in public spaces . Moreover, in the early years of his life, we'd be able to afford more childcare services.

Living in Egypt would enable Iskander to become closer to the Egyptian side of his family but, on the flip side, it would put greater distance between him and his Belgian relatives. It would also enhance his command of Arabic and awareness of Egyptian and Middle Eastern culture. But, again, on the flip side, it would have a negative impact on his Dutch and his knowledge of Belgian and European culture.

The major drawbacks of living in Cairo are the pollution and overcrowding, the massive socio-economic chasm separating those who make loads of bread and those who eat little but bread. That's not to mention Egypt's ongoing privatisation of all spheres of life, from education and healthcare, down even to open green spaces.

In fact, the white sands of the country's north coast have become a kind of luxury Club-Cairo-Med, the setting for a dystopic colony of the wealthy who have abandoned the poor (known as el-aghyar or "The Others") to their own devices, except when they need them for menial work or as game to hunt, as in Ahmed Khaled Tawfiq's futuristic novel, Utopia.

If we moved to Egypt and wished to live by our egalitarian principles and send Iskander to state schools and treat him on the public health system, we would be condemning our son to an extremely disadvantaged future. Providing him with a decent level of education and healthcare is not only relatively costly but would expose him to the kind of social elitism which, if it were to rub off on to him, we would find hard to square with our principles.

Even apparently straightforward things like finding space for him to play outdoors or take up a sport are a real challenge in a city which has planted concrete in pretty much all its green spaces, and most of what remains belong to exclusive private combined social and sporting clubs.

In contrast, Belgium – with one of the world's highest standards of living and also one of its highest taxation levels – possesses an abundant supply of high-quality state-run education and healthcare facilities. In addition, sports and other recreational activities are not solely the preserve of the well-off.

Although disparities do exist between the haves and the have-nots, most Belgians occupy the middle ground. In addition, the rule of law and principles of equality are more deeply established – which would enable Iskander to grow up in a context which is more egalitarian.

A major challenge in both societies is cultural and religious pigeon-holing. As I spelled out in an earlier article, my wife and I will raise Iskander a-religiously and it will be up to the adult him to choose his faith or lack thereof.

In Egypt, this labelling is even institutionalised. For example, a person's religion appears on their identity card and birth certificate, and both the bureaucracy and society at large assume that children belong to the same religious group as their fathers.

Although it is now technically possible to leave the religion field blank, this is generally not done, except when it comes to Egypt's small Baha'i minority, and I expect that "helpful" bureaucrats will resist our attempts not to burden our son with a faith when we come to register him in Egypt.

Ironically, Iskander's name, though most people we know love it, may label him as belonging to the minority faith in both countries. We chose the name – which means Alexander – partly because it predates both Christianity and Islam and belongs to a man who, despite being a ruthless military commander, allowed religious and cultural tolerance in his vast empire.

Nevertheless, in Egypt, unlike other Middle Eastern countries, Iskander is a rare name and is mostly used by the country's Christian minority. In the current climate of religious tension, this could cause people to discriminate against him.

In contrast, his name's exotic ring to European ears will lead many Belgians to assume that its owner is a Muslim. And although the country's institutional architecture does not force people to make professions of faith and everyone, in principle, is equal before the law and should receive equal opportunity, in reality, prejudices do exist. The demonisation of Muslims is not just limited to the far right, but extends to mainstream conservatives and even quite a few liberals and leftists.

Even if he is not labelled as belonging to a minority faith, he runs the risk of being viewed as a "foreigner" in both his homelands. This is probably more problematic in Belgium, where immigrants are treated by some with suspicion and hostility, whereas in Egypt, a hybrid European khawaga will be viewed with a mix of curiosity and awe.

Rather than lead him to become a victim of prejudice, I hope that Iskander's multicultural heritage will help him to lead a diverse, rich and fulfilling life, and will enable him to get the best out of his multiple heritage, while taking those who do not appreciate this in his stride.

The Gaurdian's Khaled Diab

Before Sunrise/ Before Sunset

Jesse: You know, I think that book that I wrote, in a way, was like building something. So that I wouldn’t forget the details of the time that we spent together. You know like, just as a reminder that…that once we really did meet, you know, that this was real. This happened.
Céline: I’m happy you’re saying that because…I mean, I always feel like a freak because I’m never able to move on like (snaps her fingers) this! You know? People just have an affair or even…entire relationships…they break up and they forget! They move on like they would have changed brand of cereals! I feel I was never able to forget anyone I’ve been with. Because each person have…their own specific qualities. You can never replace anyone. What is lost is lost.
Each relationship when it ends really damages me; I never fully recover. That’s why I’m very careful with getting involved because…it hurts too much! Even getting laid (laughs nercously)- I actually don’t do that. I will miss of the person the most mundane things. Like I’m obsessed with little things.
Maybe I’m crazy, but…when I was a little girl, my mom told me that I was always late to school. One day she followed me to see why. I was looking at chestnuts falling from the trees rolling on the sidewalk or…ants crossing the road…the way a leaf casts a shadow on a tree trunk…little things. I think it’s the same with people. I see in them little details so specific to each of them that move me and that I miss, and…will always miss. You can never replace anyone, because everyone is made of such beautiful specific details.
(Smiling directly at Jesse.) Like I remember the way your beard has a little bit of red in it. And how the sun was making it glow that…that morning, right before you left. I remember that and…I missed it! I’m really crazy, right?

11 Minutes- Paulo Coelho

“Despite her apparent freedom, her life consisted of endless hours spent waiting for a miracle, for true love, for an adventure with the same romantic ending she had seen in films and read about in books. A writer once said that it is not time that changes a man, nor knowledge; the only thing that can change someone’s mind is love. What nonsense! The person who wrote that clearly knew only one side of the coin. Love was undoubtedly one of the things capable of changing a person’s whole life, from one moment to the next. But there was the other side of the coin, the second thing that could make a human being take a totally different course from the one he or she had planned; and that was called despair. Yes, perhaps love really could transform someone, but despair did the job more quickly.”

“Humans can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.”

"The art of sex is the art of controlled abandon."

"The power of beauty: what must the world be like for ugly women?"

“Love is not to be found in someone else, but in ourselves; we simply awaken it. But in order to do that, we need the other person. The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with.”

“Profound desire, true desire is the desire to be close to someone. From that point onwards, things change, the man and the woman come into play, but what happens before–the attraction that brought them together–is impossible to explain. It is untouched desire in its purest state. When desire is still in this pure state, the man and the woman fall in love with life, they live each moment reverently, consciously, always ready to celebrate the next blessing. When people feel like this, they are not in a hurry, they do not precipitate events with unthinking actions. They know that the inevitable will happen, that what is real always finds a way of revealing itself. When the moment comes, they do not hesitate, they do not miss an opportunity, they do not let slip a single magic moment, because they respect the importance of each second.”

“Original sin was not the apple that Eve ate, it was her belief that Adam needed to share precisely the thing she had tasted. Eve was afraid to follow her path without someone to help her, and so she wanted to share what she was feeling. Certain things cannot be shared. Nor can we be afraid of the oceans into which we plunge of our own free will; fear cramps everyone’s style. Man goes through hell in order to understand this. Love one another, but let’s not try to possess one another.”

“Anyone who is in love is making love the whole time, even when they’re not. When two bodies meet, it is just the cup overflowing. They can stay together for hours, even days. They begin the dance one day and finish it the next, or–such is the pleasure they experience–they may never finish it. No eleven minutes for them.”

If You Forget Me

I want you to know one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.


Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.


If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.


If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.


But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
Pablo Neruda

“In my lifetime I’ve come to realize that you can’t depend upon other people for what you want and you can’t be scared to go out there and get it. You have to dream hard, wish big, and chase after your goals, because no one else is going to do it for you. And even if things don’t work out, you’ll always be able to say you tried.”

Unknown

I just found it interesting to talk to adults I admired, and to discover that the path they took was never all that clearly defined. It was comforting to me when I figured out that you don’t have to know what you want to do with your life; you just have to take a few steps in one direction, and other opportunities will open up.

Anderson Cooper

I find that when we really love and accept and approve of ourselves exactly as we are, then everything in life works.

Louise L. Hay

Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself. Before you can move their tears, your own must flow. To convince them, you must yourself, believe.

Winston S. Churchill

All we can do is make the best decisions we can with the best information we have at that time and place. And learn how to rebound, reinvent, and regroup. Remember—people who seem to move through life with confidence aren’t confident about the outcome of a decision; they’re confident that they can deal with the outcome, good or bad.

Stephanie Bond

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

Ronald Dahl

Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty, but learn to be happy alone. Rely upon your own energies and so do not wait for or depend on other people--Prof. Thomas Davidson

I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go. Things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they go right. You believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart, so that better things can fall together--M. Monroe

Revolutionary Road

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."

T.S.Eliot

From this particular quote, you would think I have decided on what to do and yet I still find myself ricocheting between one feeling and another- total joy and delight to suspicion. A strange mix but I think one affirmed by tonight's film "Revolutionary Road". I even commented that it seemed strange how quickly a relationship could deteriorate. Really that is quite sad that one should be transported from total love and devotion to blind hatred but I suppose love and hate are two sides of the same coin and as I always like to quote Paulo Coelho "At every moment of our lives we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss". Life changes so fast, just a second can alter the very course of our existence.

I learnt many things this week which I think have changed my outlook- to lose my inhibitions, to live for the moment and not be tied down by the classic ideals- which brings us back to Revolutionary Road. 

Richard Yates's novel Revolutionary Road was published to considerable acclaim in 1961, just as the complacent Eisenhower years were giving way to the brief Kennedy euphoria that then modulated into that heady period of liberation, experimentation and destruction known as The Sixties. The book is set in 1955 and describes with great subtlety the breakdown of the seven-year marriage between Frank and April Wheeler, a middle-class couple approaching 30, living with their two small children in the Revolutionary Road Estates, a housing development in Connecticut inhabited largely by well-heeled commuters working in Manhattan. The book gives the Wheelers a detailed specificity and the reader comes to know them - their doubts, deceptions and ambitions - from the inside. They are individuals in their own right, suffering and inflicting suffering. They also represent a general malaise peculiar to the bourgeois world of the affluent postwar years, and are victims of what Yates sees as the human condition, a tragic isolation summed up in the title of his next book, a collection of stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.

WH Auden called those postwar times The Age of Anxiety and, beneath the seemingly placid, self-satisfied surface, there was a seething discontent about conformity, social manipulation, consumerism and the future of a world threatened by nuclear extinction and environmental pollution. The bestselling cultural and sociological works that provided the intellectual fuel for the 1960s all appeared in the 50s: David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, C Wright Mills's The Power Elite, William H Whyte's The Organization Man and J K Galbraith's The Affluent Society among them. Lionel Trilling described Riesman's study as "one of the most important books about America published in recent times", and there was a widespread feeling that sociology had taken over one of the key functions of fiction. Endless symposia were devoted to "the death of the novel". So it was some relief perhaps that a novel touched with greatness should have come along to dramatise these themes in personal terms, though in retrospect many would now consider Updike's Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy (that began in 1960 with Rabbit, Run) to be a larger achievement than Revolutionary Road

Sam Mendes's film, based on a faithful screenplay by Justin Haythe, is beautifully crafted, The handsome Frank, who's working discontentedly for the same company with which his father spent 30 years, believes himself superior to this lonely crowd. His wife, April, once had ambitions to be an actress. She now feels stranded out in the split-level house with its picture window she once loved. Like most people around them, they drink too much (this was the era of hard liquor and the two-martini lunch), smoke incessantly (socially, post-coitally, to counter anxiety) and drift into casual adultery.

The couple's frustration is registered from the start, with an explosive row driving home after a local amateur dramatic performance starring April has gone hopelessly wrong. It is evident that they hate each other, and everything thereafter is a cover-up, a sweeping of bad faith under the carpet. Then she has a plan to retrieve their lives. They'll pack everything in, move to romantic Paris, where she'll get a well-paid secretarial job and he'll think great thoughts and write them down. Like Billy Liar when invited by the alluring Liz to quit the industrial north and accompany her to liberating London, Frank soon gets cold feet. The offer of promotion and an enticingly luxurious corporate life prove irresistible. April, however, is hooked on her pipe dream, but tragedy lies ahead. They cannot confront their real problems, and neither can stand the accusatory words of the mentally disturbed John, the brilliant, intellectual son of middle-aged neighbours, a brutal truth-teller who's stepped right out of an Ibsen play.

Mendes's film is a lesser thing than Yates's novel, lacking the book's biting wit and larger resonances. For instance, it's never stated that the amateur production April appears in so disastrously is Robert Sherwood's pretentious 1935 pseudo-classic The Petrified Forest, where she plays an idealistic girl given the opportunity to escape to Paris during the Depression by an Eliot-quoting intellectual disillusioned with modern life. Nor do we get any sense of April and Frank being more than mismatched malcontents. In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which arrived a year after Revolutionary Road, Edward Albee called his sterile battling couple George and Martha to suggest a symbolic association with George and Martha Washington, who had no children together. Yates's title also takes us back to the 18th century, implying that in Frank (whose full name Franklin evokes the Founding Fathers) and April (Eliot's cruellest month) we see the search for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ending with the corruption of the American Dream.

Heavy stuff perhaps- though I like o think the message is much simpler, pointing to the dire implications of not following your dreams. Do you love me really? Do you just wish to enjoy me? Or is there some more practical end to all of this? Only time will tell but I will try and live my own dreams....